General Motors Celebrates a 100-Year History of Technological Breakthroughs

The Steering Column

We are coming up on September 16, the day 100 years ago that William Crapo Durant incorporated General Motors. Durant’s creation is a business saga about which much has been written, including the fact that Durant ended up unloved for his efforts and died penniless in 1947. As an engineer, however, I’m much more fascinated by GM’s heritage of technological progress, invention, and even daring.

In the company’s first 50 years, GM could claim to have invented, among other things, the electric starter, the mass production of cars with interchangeable parts, high-octane leaded gasoline, the automatic transmission, the manual transmission with synchromesh for easier gearshifting, and the high-compression V-8 engine. But being a self-centered baby boomer, I’m captivated by GM’s technological adventures that took place during the Sixties, when GM was at the top of its game.

To kick off the decade, Chevrolet introduced the 1960 Corvair. The brainchild of Chevrolet general manager Ed Cole, the Corvair was thoroughly unorthodox. It was the only American car that had an air-cooled engine, and that engine—made largely from aluminum—was located at the rear. It was the lone American with an independent suspension at all four wheels. Not to mention it was compact and slung much lower than the behemoth sedans of its day. Designed in 1957—then as now, all-new models took some time to bring to market—the Corvair was conceptually identical to the Porsche 911 concept that would debut at the 1963 Frankfurt auto show. For 1962, Chevy even offered a Monza Spyder model with 150 turbocharged, if exaggerated, horsepower, foreshadowing the Porsche 911 Turbo that would appear 12 years later.

Going from 0 to 60 mph, the Corvair Monza Spyder Turbo could barely break 10 seconds, which was none too quick even in 1960. More importantly, the rear-engined Corvair, designed at a time when all cars wore the same size tires front and rear, relied on a large differential in tire pressure (15 psi front, 26 psi rear) to maintain reasonably stable handling. But just about every other car on the road used the same tire pressure all around, and when a Corvair’s tires were inevitably inflated with equal pressures—as they accidentally would be—the result was big-time oversteer. The resulting accidents didn’t help the car’s sales and attracted the attention of a young attorney named Ralph Nader, who used the Corvair’s peculiarities to achieve fame as a safety crusader. Moreover, the Corvair hit the market just as the muscle-car era began, and even a greatly improved ’65 Corvair couldn’t compete against cubic inches and brute force.

A few years later, GM departed from the existing mechanical orthodoxy in a completely different way with the 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado. This car had a 7.0-liter, 385-gross-horsepower V-8 in the traditional forward position, but it drove the car’s front wheels. It was, by far, the most powerful front-drive production car ever built—both at the time and to this day.

The key to making this powertrain work was the three-speed Turbo-Hydramatic transmission that an engineer named Bob Stempel—some three decades later he would become GM’s CEO—essentially broke in half. Stempel bolted the torque converter to the engine in normal fashion but separated the rest of the transmission, turned it completely around, and mounted it next to the engine’s oil pan, pointing forward. A two-inch-wide silent chain made up of 2294 individual pieces, the kind used to drive camshafts in those days, connected the torque converter to the remote gearbox. At the output end of the transmission, near the front of the engine, was a compact differential. From the left side of the differential, a universal-jointed half-shaft went to the left-front wheel, and on the right, a short shaft went through the engine’s oil pan where it hooked up with an equal-length half-shaft on the right side.

It was an excellent car, extremely well received. It didn’t hurt that the car had an elegant design—one of the first anywhere in which the roof flowed smoothly into the lower body without any clear separation. The novel driveline weighed about 170 pounds less than a conventional rear-drive setup, provided a flat floor and increased interior space, and proved reliable. In fact, the basic layout also was extended to the Cadillac Eldorado and Buick Riviera and remained in use until 1985.

Today, General Motors is developing another car that is at least as bold a move as were the Corvair and the Toronado. It’s the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid that debuted at the 2007 Detroit show. GM has promised that the Volt will hit the market before the end of 2010. To make it work, GM will have to perfect not only the first serial hybrid powertrain ever brought to market, but the corporation will need to also develop, thoroughly test, and figure out how to build the largest lithium-ion battery pack ever to see mass production.

General Motors might be a centenarian, but the company hasn’t lost its willingness to assault technological boundaries.

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